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There are remarkable similarities between Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Elleke Boehmer's Bloodlines which were published in 2000. Both present characters, classified as coloured under the race categories of apartheid, who are compelled to re-examine their past, and both texts set this endeavour in the South Africa of 1990-91 which they represent as a time of euphoria and fear-filled uncertainty. The resistance movements had just been unbanned and leaders released from prison, and an interim constitution was being drawn up so that a government of national unity could oversee the country's first democratic elections in 1994. At the same time, as previously exiled revolutionary groupings re-established themselves in the country, rumours of counter-coups circulated and ordinary people were subjected to a decade of continuing terror as various factions either enforced or resisted change.

These novels also reflect an apparently more reassuring feature of their period of writing — presumably the years just before their publication in 2000. This was the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), hearings in which the role of individual memory in liberation and in nation building was publicly enacted. In their representation of the reception of historical inquiry conducted through personal stories, both novels engage with one of the problematic aspects of the TRC to which Robins (1998) has pointed. He argues that despite its noble purposes, the testimonies that the TRC received were not always reported to the public in their full and painful complexity, and sometimes this was because the agenda of nation building was allowed to re-shape what was being said. For example, during a televised broadcast of a woman's account of how her sister was burned alive on suspicion of being a police informer and of how she had had to identify her sister's sexually mutilated body, the SABC interrupted her evidence with `a commissioner's call for a minute of silence to salute … [the dead woman's] heroism and martyrdom'. In this way the sister's `traumatic memory of the mutilation of … [a] tortured body' was mis-appropriated into the heroic narrative of a nation in formation (Robins 138). It is in this context of difficult, uncomfortable and dangerous reporting that Wicomb and Boehmer explore the politics of identity in the 1990s; here they situate their protagonists who, as the prospect of nationhood somewhat paradoxically brings both liberation and coercive control, ask themselves `where do I belong?' and `to what?'

Bodies of Writing: Recovering the Past in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Elleke Boehmer's Bloodlines